Xiaomi’s new Mi Pad 2 tablet has been listed and should be available shortly. In the meantime, a number of white-box Cherry Trail tablets are getting a Black Friday price cut.

We already covered Xiaomi’s new tablet, but in case you missed it, it’s a 7.9-incher based on Intel’s new Atom x5-Z8500, which we had a chance to try out in a Teclast tablet, and we found it to be a very fast chip for the price.

Gearbest is listing the new Xiaomi tablet starting at $195 in presale for the 16GB Android version. In case you want more storage, for $249 you can get a 64GB version running Windows or Android. If you’re not into Xiaomi, or if you can’t wait for it to start shipping, the reseller has informed us that its Black Friday tablet promotion is live, and you can check it out here.

As we pointed out in some of our previous reports, Chinese tablet vendors are slowly shifting to 2-in-1s and even regular notebooks, usually based on Cherry Trail processors, with prices starting at about $200. Cheaper 8-inch models are available for $100 or so. In addition to Atoms, Chinese tablet makers are also offering powerful Core M designs, usually priced at $300-400.

Another side-effect of the Cherry Trail rollout is that Bay Trail tablets are going to the bargain bin. You can scoop up a 10-inch or 9.7-inch device for a tad over $100, in dual-boot flavour, with a decent 2048x1536 panel. So, if you just want a cheap tablet and don't need a lot of GPU muscle, Bay Trail could still be a sensible option.

A few interesting research reports were published over the past few days and they seem to prove what many in the tech press have been saying for much of 2013 – dirt cheap tablets are disrupting the market. It was relatively easy to dismiss white-box tablet makers from mainland China last year, but just a year later they seem to be making a killing.

According to NPD DisplaySearch, shipments of tablet PC panels started recovering in July, but much of the growth is coming from 7-inch panels, which made up a staggering 49 percent of all panel shipments.

“Low-priced white-box brands accounted for 59 percent of 7-inch panels and 43 percent of all tablet PC panel shipments in July,” said NPD.

Apple is of course still the biggest player and one in four tablet panels ends up in an iPad. However, this is changing, too. The current iPad line-up is ready for a refresh, so demand is pretty soft. In fact, according to another report out of ABI Research, Android tablets surpassed iOS tablets in the second quarter, while revenues reached parity and the average selling price of the iPad tumbled 17 percent, thanks to the iPad mini.

“Smaller 7-inch class tablets are finally the majority of shipments,” said ABI’s Jeff Orr. “The 7.9-inch iPad mini represented about 60 percent of total iPad shipments and 49 percent of iPad-related device revenues in the quarter.”

What’s more, Apple’s iPad line accounted for just 50 percent of worldwide end-user revenues. Naturally, Apple’s numbers will improve in Q4, as it introduces the new iPad 5 and iPad mini 2.

The rumour mill is happily chugging along, too. There’s talk of lower than expected Nexus 7 2 shipments, weak sales of flagship Android tablets and so on. It all paints a rather bleak picture for big brand tablets who rushed into the $199 tablet space after the Nexus 7 hype last summer. A few analysts like Andy Hargreaves of Pacific Crest Securities told CNBC that the tablet market has already overheated and it will slow down fast. Pacific Crest recently slashed its 2013 tablet forecast from 169 million units to 151 million. Most of the cut came from Apple.

People who are in the market for a cheap 7-incher want exactly that – a cheap tablet. Not a $229 Nexus 7, Tegra Note, Asus MeMO Pad, or god forbid an Intel Windows tablet. They want something at half the price, they are not interested in value added features, gimmicks or top of the line performance – just a nice screen.

Ironically, supermarket chain Tesco seems to have figured it out before the heavyweights - it's a race to the bottom. As of today it’s selling a £119 tablet with a 1440x900 screen, no bells and whistles. Leave it to a grocer to teach the tech industry a lesson.

Chinese white-box tablet churners are doing quite well, although they don’t grab many headlines. For a couple of years they were perfectly happy selling cheap 7- inch tablets, at less than half the price of 10-inchers from big brands.

However, the Nexus 7 disrupted the market last year, along with Amazon tablets. This year it’s getting even tougher, as Google and Amazon revamped their line-up, and they joined by Acer, Asus, Tesco and Nvidia to name but a few new players in the cheap tablet space. As a result, Chinese tablet makers are turning to even cheaper components and targeting even lower price points. Most big brand low-end tablets are priced around $150, so white-box outfits are now forced to go even cheaper, reports Digitimes.

For example, the cheapest 7-inch tablet carried by Walmart is priced at just $49, while 8- to 9-inch models with dual-core A9 processors go for as little as $99. Prices in Europe are a tad higher, as usual. The cheapest of the cheap go for less than €50, while €100 will buy you a dual-core with 1GB of RAM and 8GB to 16GB of storage, which doesn’t sound bad all things considered.

However, the race to the bottom is not reserved for nameless outfits from China. The cheapest Asus MeMo Pad with a VIA 1.0GHz processor, 1GB of RAM and 16GB of storage can be picked up for about €100. The same goes for the Acer Iconia Tab B1, with 512MB of RAM, 8GB of storage and a dual-core Mediatek SoC. Archos also has a few models in the sub-€100 segment. Amazon.de used to sell the Lenovo IdeaTab A1000 for €99, but it’s out of stock.

Of course, there’s a ton of sub-€100 tablets from smaller, but relatively established players like Archos, Prestigio, Point of View and others. They all have one thing in common - €99.99 is the price point they’re all gunning for.

This trend is going largely unnoticed, as dirt cheap tablets are not something the tech press tends to write about. However, IDC’s recent figures indicate that the combined share of small tablet vendors rose from 26 percent last year to 39 percent in the second quarter of this year.

So who is buying them? We have a tendency to look at everything from a techie perspective, but low-end tablets are getting so cheap that they are competing with actual toys – and kids love them. For some reason, this particular niche hasn’t been filled by big vendors, one would expect to see a lot more dirt cheap, rubberized tablets designed specifically for the preschool crowd.